


my love is a weapon

by ruinarn



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Enemies to Friends to Lovers to Enemies, M/M, Switch Relationship, big boss was not always a total monster, internalized homophobic language, violence as foreplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-25
Updated: 2018-04-25
Packaged: 2019-04-27 16:49:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14429952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruinarn/pseuds/ruinarn
Summary: Kaz had always been the one person that had ever really caught your interest. He'd been willful and strong and refused to do what you said just because you said it, so naturally you'd done your damndest to bend him to your will anyway.





	my love is a weapon

**Author's Note:**

> i've had this in my drafts for a literal year. i'm as happy with this as i'm probably going to be. the original intent was something like a character study for bb trying to break down the decisions he made, but it ended up as bbkaz, because that is how i roll.
> 
> there's a mostly-written part 2 but chances are it's never coming out of my drafts folder rip sorry everyone

Kaz told you once that he remembers the instant the two of you met with perfect clarity, the way your eyes locked as you both held death in your hands, your thumb over his on the grenade pin the only thing keeping either of you alive, the natural result of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Of course, he told you this after at least three beers, maybe four, the point where he usually stopped making such a racket and got quietly sentimental instead, and he never brought it up again. But the romantic, picturesque snapshot he painted surprised you.

You, you remember how you hadn't bathed for at least four days and stank to all hell, the heat of the day, the way the humidity had made the air feel like melted tallow, sweat-soaked fatigues sticking to your skin, the _flies_. You remember the messy way a 12-gauge shell tore through the throat of one of your enemies, the man gasping and gurgling and trying to hold together the remains of his shredded trachea, and you remember the way the enemy commander used that man's death to pull off a tactical retreat-- a workable if cruel plan, poorly executed, the picture of inexperience.

You remember tracking down the enemy commander, being ready to take him out like it was any other day, until he yelled (in English, not Spanish) that he wanted to die by _hara-kiri_ , with honor, that he wanted you to be his _kaishakunin_. It had been enough of a surprise to make you really look at the man, consider him as a person and not a body with a gun attached. Caused you to notice the contrast of his blond hair with the Japanese-accented Spanish he'd shouted to his men a few minutes before, how young he was for a commander, and the way he acted like dying on his own terms wasn't losing. You remembered not being surprised at all that he turned out to be a dishonorable bastard, or by his brazen, reckless attempt at a suicide attack. And you remember the way he passed out from blood loss almost immediately after.

The entire time you'd been fighting, you hadn't thought much about the man, or really much at all. For you, fighting is and has always been all wordless reactions driven by something utterly empty inside you that only cares about victory and survival-- there's no room for anything else when your gun is in your hand, no empathy, no humanity, no past, no self, and no future. Only a blur of sights and sounds and motion and the feeling of your heart beating inside your chest.

(‘You fight like an animal, not a human,’ Python had told you once, after he’d watched you shoot an escaping captive right between the shoulderblades-- a man you'd warned several times to not try to run. ‘The same way a dog shakes to kill the rabbit in its jaws. No malice. Just instinct. It’s pure, in a way.’ Which made you wonder, of course, what that said about you.)

But that day, just before you'd turned back to get a head count on your people, see if the number was lower than it ought to be, instinct was what had made you give the enemy commander a second look. Unbidden, _her_ words had echoed through your mind, as clear as if she'd whispered them in your ear.

“Is there a such thing as an absolute, timeless enemy?”

She'd always made you feel more human, given you a direction and a sense of clarity, made you more than the bottomless void filled with teeth and claws. It had been part of what bound you to her, that clarity, that feeling of a haze being lifted from your mind and the edges of the world sharpening around you. She’d taught you the meaning of restraint, of thinking twice.

And in that moment, the effect she’d always had on you had stretched through time and touched you. You’d realized you respected this enemy-- admired his strength of will, his determination, whatever it was that made him refuse to give in even when he was well and truly beaten. Perhaps it was _yamato damashii_ , the “Japanese spirit” of kamikaze pilots that the news had talked about when you were young. A type of blind, bottomless courage that made men charge headlong into death for an ideal. The man at your feet had the soul of a suicide pilot, but one who was willing to die for his own pride, not someone else’s. So, a samurai, though notably lacking in the appropriate ethics.

In the absence of her, you'd lost your way, hadn't known how to grow as a warrior until just then when you'd stared down and seen the grenade pin still clenched in the man's hand. This was what you were missing, what you needed to learn. Determination in the face of utter defeat, the guts to spit in Death's face even as it cleaved your head from your body with its scythe. You could watch this man. Learn from him.

And so, you'd picked up the samurai's crumpled, unconscious form, and thrown him over your shoulder. He was heavier than you’d expected-- taller than you if not quite as wide of frame, but surprisingly muscular for a guy who didn’t seem all that used to combat. You actually almost _struggled_ a little, at some points, but you got him home all the same.

\---

You’d wanted him near you, by your side.

He, by contrast, had wanted nothing to do you with you.

Back in those days, you’d never killed enemies, if it could be helped. It was better for them, better for everyone if you took them alive and turned them to your cause. And most had been easily convinced. After all, you offered them the home they’d been seeking-- a place where they were protected. Cared for. Never made into tools or thrown away as sacrifices. Of course, not all of them saw the light at first, but at that point it became a matter of reading them. Some had to be convinced why you were the logical choice. Some had to believe you were a man of your word, of your ideals. And some just had to be flat-out intimidated. 

Certain that the samurai fell into the last category, you’d come in shortly after he’d woken, while he was still weak, and came prepared with all the information you could find on him. He had to believe that he’d been outplayed.

You’d asked nicely. He’d refused. You’d reasoned. He’d refused. You threatened, low and rough and violent, He’d listened, a bit, stormy blue eyes flickering from wariness to anger to interest and settling on stubborn pride. So he wouldn’t back down, even if you held all the cards and he knew damn well you could make him suffer.

You’d reasoned some more. And he’d ceded, finally, on a _contest_ to determine whether or not he’d join you. Something that would let him keep his pride if he lost. Once again, he’d caught your interest. No one had ever tried that with you before. So you humored him.

For the next week, your thoughts had drifted over and over to the contest, to the image of _Kazuhira Miller_ growling out a reluctant surrender, too proud to meet your eye.  It stirred… _something_ in you, something that you couldn’t and still can’t name.

But you contacted your spies, too. You weren’t naive enough to think that this man would suddenly start playing by the rules.

\---

The day came, and you beat him, over and over and over in everything he could name, to his increasing frustration. He was not, apparently, accustomed to losing. At least not at everything, repeatedly and to the same person. Most people you encountered weren’t, but most people also took it better, or at least didn’t keep dragging things on. Even if you hadn’t been in on his plan and turned all his own people against him, you definitely would have guessed something was up by the time the sun was going down. And if not then, you absolutely would have when he tried to lead you into a fairly obvious ambush.

In the middle of the jungle, heavily bandaged from the last week’s injuries, with zero allies, every other guerrilla group his enemy, and twenty-five guns aimed at him, Kazuhira Miller finally believed that he was outplayed. 

It was join or die, and he joined. Saved his pride by calling it a “partnership”, but you hadn’t really cared what he called it. He’d lost at his own game, and so from that moment on, he was yours. 

The fact that he proved himself five minutes later when you found yourself on the same side of the fight was just a bonus. And the way he’d yelled to you about enemies on your blind side and instinctively ducked out of the way of every shot you lined up like you’d been fighting together for years , well. You hadn’t given too much thought to it at the time.

\---

Every once in awhile, you’d sparred with each and every one of the men in a row, both as a challenge for yourself and to remind them how much they had to learn. Normally, each one of the men had lasted about a minute before they either tapped out or were thrown to the ground hard enough that they didn’t get back up.

The first time you tried it with him, Kaz went for ten. Not because he was all that much better, with his textbook JSDF judo-- though he had potential, you could see that clearly --but because he completely refused to stop the match, even after what was probably a cracked collarbone, several broken ribs, a badly twisted ankle, and enough bruises that even moving would be painful as soon as the adrenaline wore off.

“There’s no point in hurting yourself like this,” you’d pointed out, throwing another punch at his solar plexus. “You’re wasting your energy on me. Save it for the enemy.”

“ _You’re_ my enemy right now,” he’d retorted, catching your hand in his. You’d thrown a punch with your opposite hand. He’d caught that one, too.

You pushed forward, trying to break his grip with sheer force. “Not the one that counts. What’s the real reason you won’t tap out?”

“Simple. 七転び八起き.” he’d gasped, muscles straining. “Fall down seven times, stand up eight.”

“That’s a good saying,” you’d admitted, before you’d headbutted him so hard you knocked him out.

\---

The two of you still hadn't really gotten along for a good few months. New “business partners” or not (it turned out Kaz actually  _ hadn’t _ just said that it save his pride), you got the impression that he hadn’t quite forgiven you for humiliating him, and when it wasn’t about business, he’d avoided you.

But he'd been good with numbers and organization and had a head for logistics, all of the things you'd never been particularly good at, while you simultaneously compensated for his inexperience and the way he seemed to have considerable difficulty getting people to listen to him. Undeniably, you made a good team. You thought the same way, almost always, converged on the same solution with opposite thought processes. Sometimes, when you disagreed, he was actually _right_ , which had been hard to swallow at first. Other times, he was not, and your discussions subsequently devolved into shouting matches, then fistfights.

(At least those conversations tended to go better the second time around. Venting all your frustration and physically exhausting yourselves apparently made both of you more amicable to compromise.)

Slowly, conversations stopped feeling like pulling teeth. Kaz fell into step beside you, applied that determination towards working _together_ on your organization rather than pushing back against you every step of the way, a nd seemingly, stopped thinking of you as his enemy, although honestly, he hadn’t been  _ your _ enemy since you removed that grenade from his hand.

But he never, ever accepted you as being better than him. Whatever you beat him at, either deliberately or in passing, he dedicated all his time and energy to getting better at. Within two months, he picked up the basics of CQC. Three months and he was a much better shot with a 1911, an 870, an M4, and an MP5, and made sure to inform you that he  _ could _ reassemble them blindfolded now.  Four months, and he was hitting the level of CQC even your most experienced soldiers were at. Five, and he was commanding respect among your men, even when he’d never had among his own. Six, and you actually had to give it your all if you wanted to deflect his blows when he sparrred with you.

At six months and ten days, he locked his arm around your neck and pressed a dummy knife to your ascending aorta, for one breath, two, and you’d laughed for the first time in _years_. You’d felt giddy. Lightheaded. And then you’d broken his hold and thrown him to the ground.

But when he pushed himself back up to his feet, he’d grinned, blood dripping from his split lip, and you knew that he knew if this had been for real, you’d be dead.

From then on, you set aside a half hour to spar with him, personally, each morning. If you’re honest with yourself, it had been the best part of your day. This, this had been what you’d wanted to learn from him.

\---

‘Having personal feelings for your comrades is one of the greatest sins you can commit’. A lesson that you still hadn’t learned, back then.

You'd killed _her,_ you'd been used by EVA, you'd been betrayed by Zero, you'd almost fought Python to the death, and somehow still you hadn't goddamn learned that even the closest allies always turn against you in the end. If she had been there, she'd have slapped you so hard across the back of your head that your eyes watered.

But it was hard to brush Kaz off when he laughed and yelled and fought and dreamed with the brightness of a flashbang, made himself impossible to ignore. He threw everything he had at you, and forced you to respond in kind or lose. And you chose to respond in kind, pushing yourself in a way you hadn't in years because he made you _want_ to.

Back in those days, when he pushed back against you, you felt a little warmer, even something like being alive, like you weren't just limply existing in the time between battles the way you had every day since she'd died. You'd always kept the world at a distance, rarely engaged yourself in anything, but the way he constantly confronted you and kept confronting you after each subsequent defeat caught your attention. The promise of competition that actually challenged you drew you in, the strength of the raw emotion behind every punch he threw mirrored itself in your own chest, and it felt _good_ to smirk cockily at him and get that rush of satisfaction each time you threw him to the ground. It was a juxtaposition-- you wanted so badly to beat him for good, to break his will, but the more you kept trying the more you found it impossible, which was somehow almost better.

“Kaz,” you'd finally said one morning, and tossed him a stopwatch. “My record mile time's five-nineteen.”

The unspoken, unprecedented _acknowledgement_ that you thought him capable of beating that bypassed him completely, and he raised his aviators to squint at you. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”

“It's not seven yet, and you don't look tired enough.” Which you said in the voice that to anyone else, meant an order, but Kaz generally took as a suggestion.

“What, so you want me to race a clock?” He scowled. “Come on, at least race me yourself. It'll only take a couple minutes, right?”

The last part had been suspiciously backhanded, as if he did not quite believe you could _consistently_ run a mile in well under six minutes, but in the end it had been five-twelve for you, five-sixteen for him, and you hadn't shrugged off the congratulatory arm he threw over your shoulder as you tried desperately to catch your breath, every muscle in your body burning. It had been warm, and heavy, and unlike anything you’d felt in a long, long time.

A few moments later, he had apparently thought it would be funny to use his newfound proximity to try to tug the knot on your bandanna loose, and you’d promptly caught his wrist and twisted until he yelped.  To be fair, he should have known better that to touch it.

\---

For most of your life, you've been functionally asexual, sex being at best an inconvenient physical need that had to be dealt with when it could no longer be ignored. You'd tried sleeping with someone else once, and although it had been nice in the moment, the fact you'd woken up alone with no company except the realization you'd been used hadn't really left you in a hurry to try again. Add the fact that there had always been more important things to worry about and well, you'd never really gotten much experience.

Kaz, for his part, was good at that kind of thing, and you'd never really understood what that meant until, in the middle of a heated argument about whether or not to ally yourselves with the local drug cartel, he'd slammed you against the cabin wall as if he was about to start throwing punches, except he'd rammed his mouth up against yours, and his tongue too when you gasped in surprise. But even in anger he'd kissed you expertly in a way that shot sparks down your spine, and for a long moment you'd barely moved, breathless, unable to respond--

\--all of a sudden he'd pulled back, eyes wide, then careful and calculating, the look he always got when he was about to talk a client into paying for the privilege of whitewashing their own fence. He'd opened his mouth to say something, almost definitely a lie--

\--and you'd grabbed the back of his head and crushed your lips to his with all the finesse of a mortar shell, managed to smash your teeth together, and let out a low noise you completely denied in hindsight.

\---

Sex, while it didn't exactly change the nature of your relationship, probably should have changed what it was called. But you didn't know what to call it then, and you still don't, because it wasn't just a friendship and you weren’t _dating_ and it wasn't really anywhere between the two, either. Kaz, for his part, had kept sleeping his way through the female soldiers with exactly no comment on what he'd meant to convey by wrapping his hand around both of your dicks, jerking you off against each other, and leaving thirty seconds after he finished with some vague comment about a shower.

To be fair, you hadn’t exactly tried to talk to him to clarify things, either. Not the next week when the day had been hot enough that his skin was flushed and slick with sweat, not when he pulled at his scarf and unbuttoned the first few buttons of his shirt to cool down, and not when the sight of him like that had been too much and you’d kissed him out of nowhere in turn, grabbing his ass to pull him closer as soon as you felt him kissing back.

And so, in the absence of any clear relationship change, sex just sort of became a thing that the two of you did. You learned what he tasted like, what it felt like inside him and, sometimes, what he felt like inside you. _He_ learned that if the two of you were doing this, you weren't going to let anyone else touch him. That was a thing he learned repeatedly, the hard way every time, and maybe he never so much learned as he gave in to the lesson for the moment, let you sink your teeth into his shoulder and whisper threats of what you'd do to him if you saw him doing something like that again, only to forget about it a few weeks later.

Eventually, you reached a fragile peace where you tracked him down every time you suspected he might have the slightest bit of a hard-on and he stopped actively trying to slip your leash solely to make the point that he didn't belong to you. 'Fragile', because there were still incidents, something you'd never figured out because you knew for a fact you'd learned to get him off better than anyone else ever had. Better than anyone else ever _could_ , because only you had the strength to fuck him as hard as he needed and the instinct to make him hurt where and how he wanted to. As it turned out, Kaz was one hell of a masochist.

But the only thing you could guess, in hindsight, is that he'd been toying with your jealousy on purpose. Maybe he liked the attention.

\---

As the months passed, five-six-seven-eight-- had it really been two years since you’d met him? --you'd gotten addicted to the feeling of him under you because every gasp and cry you wrung from him rushed through your veins like a drug and the feeling of his hamming pulse stole the breath from your lungs. He was sharp, he was vibrant, you couldn't ignore him or distance yourself or be anywhere but entirely in that moment alongside him. There was a raw physicality and a challenge to sex, too, one that you'd never really considered until Kaz had his back and hips contorted at a seemingly impossible angle and half your muscles were aching from the exertion of holding most of his body weight.

Every time you'd left marks across his body-- in the heat of the moment, at first, and later more deliberately to remind him where you'd been and what you'd done to him. Rough bites across his neck and shoulders, occasionally breaking the skin, nail marks across his hips, red lines from where you'd tied him down with cable ties, flowering bruises across his throat when you'd had some kind of deep instinct to _make_ _him submit_ and he'd gotten off from almost passing out. And he gave nearly as good as he got-- the bites across your neck were always fewer, but darker from the way he used to run his tongue across them, your scalp tingled from how hard he pulled your hair, and he often scratched deep, angry marks into the skin of your back. The two of you would trade bruised ribs, bloody noses, bitten tongues-- at one point, you’d even concussed him, though that was decidedly accidental.

At the time, you hadn’t thought of anything like the morality of what you were doing, but now you have to look back and wonder what the men must have thought of their commanders being incredibly obvious sexual deviants, between being fags and getting off on beating each other up. But none of them had ever had the guts to ask you to your face, so you suppose you’ll never know.

Often, the things you’d done had been non-penetrative for practical reasons-- it was inconvenient to try and work someone’s ass open when you were fucking in a supply tent ten minutes before you were supposed to leave for a job, and downright impossible when one of you (Kaz) had decided that the back of an open, moving helicopter was a great place for sex and the presence of a pilot just made things more exciting.

But when you’d been able to set time aside, there was absolutely nothing like the low groans you could only get out of Kaz with your cock buried deep in him and your hand wrapped around his throat.  He was proud, even in bed, refused to beg and always tried to bite his tongue before he let himself sound anything other than cocky and collected, but you’d learned what he liked, what you had to do for him to make honest noises of desperation.

At first, you’d pushed him down and made him yours. Later, he let you have him.

And occasionally, he'd talked his way into doing you, with either the silver tongue you'd known he possessed since the day you met or the one you'd only discovered recently, claiming he'd never liked bottoming because he didn't get off as well without his dick in something warm (“No, Snake, your _hand_ doesn't count”). While you were pretty sure that, whether or not it had been true before, it was complete bullshit when he was was with you, you'd let him have his way anyway.

Honestly, you'd have let him top you more often if he hadn't been completely insufferable while doing it, methodically playing your body like an instrument only to pull away and leave you wanting, looking down at you with blown pupils and an expression like a cat playing with a mouse, even as you growled out breathless threats for him to get on with things. He was such a tease, it was maddening, but in the end you'd come gasping and shaking hard enough that you probably should've felt embarrassed, though you never really did (it was Kaz, it was fine, he’d already seen you high out of your mind on morphine, horribly sick, falling asleep slumped against his shoulder). Which was fortunate, because he’d liked to watch you, still with that same intense look, like having someone like you under his thumb made him feel powerful.

But putting that trust in him had been a mistake. All of it had been a mistake, really.

\---

Still, aside from whatever the hell you were doing to each others’ dicks, you’d been friends. As it turned out, Kaz was the only other person around genuinely interested in Lexington-class battlecruisers and the details of the _Arthashastra_.

“--but in the end, it meant there was less disease in the camps,” you’d finished, looking to Kaz’s face to make sure he was still following.

“Shit, Snake.” he’d said with a laugh. “That’s the most I’ve ever heard you say in one breath.”

You’d grumbled irritably, fairly certain you were being mocked.

“Y’know, if I’d known all I had to do to get you to talk for ten minutes straight was ask you about eighteenth-century Russian generals, I’d have asked a long time ago.”

By this point in your friendship, you’d mastered the art of rolling your single eye in such a way to make your exasperation appropriately felt.

Kaz had, at least, had the grace to look a little apologetic. “Suvorov was really something, though. I’ve actually never read ‘Suzdal Regulations’, you know that? ‘The Science of Victory’ was pretty good, but--”

\---

The point, in hindsight, where it _really_ should have stopped it is when the two of you had started telling each other things you'd never told anyone else, things you’d never _wanted_ to tell anyone else but came tumbling out around each other anyway.

It had started with stupid things. Fears, because neither of you were afraid of death, danger, or pain, but it turned out that just like you were afraid of vampires, Kaz was afraid of centipedes.

(“I'm not afraid of them, I just-- I just _hate_ them-- they're horrible and ugly, Snake, how can you not see that? You've never seen a full-grown _mukade_. I'm going to chalk it up to that. When you see one of those, you'll understand.”)

(You didn't have the heart to tell him that you'd seen a _scolopendra subspinipes_ in Tselinoyarsk, and it hadn't tasted half bad. That was a decision you'd promptly regretted after he'd laughed himself breathless over the vampire thing, and again at your stubborn belief in Santa. But he hadn't tried to convince you that Santa wasn't real like everyone else always had, just smiled softly after he finished yuking it up at your expense.)

You shouldn't have told him about about moving all the time as a kid, about how yes-sirs, no-sirs, and the echoing sound of gunfire were quite literally all you'd ever known, about harsh discipline and high expectations and knowing just enough to be afraid. You shouldn't have told him your real name, your full name, even if he understood implicitly not to use it.

(He'd only ever called you 'John' four times, and three of them were as the punchline of some kind of play on words. Even on the rare occasion he gasped out your name in bed, it was Snake, it was always Snake. A name was what meant something to you, he’d said, whether or not you were born with it.)

You shouldn't have let him tell you about how when he was young he'd started schoolyard fights just to vent his anger about how unfairly people treated him, or how he'd watched his mother slowly go insane and die in a hospital bed over the course of years. You shouldn't have let him tell you about how utterly _alone_ he'd been before MSF, should have pushed away his hand when it reached for yours.

And you never, ever, _ever_ should have told him about what happened in that field in Russia, the way the petals of the Star-of-Bethlehems turned from white to red, especially not in the dead of night when neither of you had been able to sleep and you'd run into each other on the deck, your voice barely audible over the crash of the waves.

He’d stayed with you for hours after that, in silence. You shouldn’t have let him.

\---

He hadn't been wrong, the sunsets here were pretty, and he was good company to enjoy them with. The evening had seemed surreal, even at the time, possibly because you'd both agreed, for once, to forget about work and take some time out for yourselves. After all that had happened, you both needed a break, if only for a few hours.

Of course, you'd immediately decided the best thing to do on a picture-perfect paradise of a beach at sunset was to use the presence of soft, fall-breaking sand as an excuse to throw each other around, but Kaz went with it, shoving at you with a grin, and within a couple of minutes it devolved into the two of you roughhousing like a pair of kids. You'd kissed him, somewhere between you putting him in a headlock and him trying kicking you in the shins, and the two of you had lazily made out on the sand for awhile and shared some half-assed handjobs. Then you'd opted to strip off your remaining clothes to cool off in the water, and spent another hour doing some utterly undignified nonsense that resembled nothing so much as trying to good-naturedly drown each other.

But eventually you'd exhausted each other and crawled out, watching the last colors of the sky fade in comfortable silence while you dried off enough to put your clothes back on.

After a few minutes, he'd turned to look at you, drops of water trickling from his hair and running slowly down the skin of his tanned chest and shoulders. His aviators had been tucked away with the rest of his clothes, and you'd been privy to the rare sight of his naked eyes. The image is still seared into your memory-- his eyes were bluer than your own, and darker, and stared at you with something you could only describe as being akin to vulnerability. He'd opened his mouth like he wanted to say something. Hesitated, as if it was important. The silence hung heavy, as if you were on the precipice of _something_ and he was about to break it.

 

 

 

 

 

But he didn’t, and sometimes you wonder if things would have been different if he did.


End file.
